Marketplace icon: the fashion show

In this paper, we reconstruct the history of fashion shows and highlight the crucial role mediatization process have played in the turning of these events into marketplace icons. As the media and image reproduction technologies changed, so too did fashion shows, providing a different basis for their iconicity. During their long history, the goal to diffuse promotional fashion collection images had to be balanced with the need to protect intellectual property rights. During the haute couture era, the latter prevailed, resulting in fashion shows having limited iconicity. With prêt-à-porter, the benefit of media coverage more than compensated the risks of imitation and counterfeiting, facilitating fashion shows’ elevation to full iconicity. The rapidity of fast fashion retailers’ adoption of catwalk trends makes intellectual property rights’ protection more salient in today’s social media-saturated environment. Seen as a historical process, marketplace elements’ iconicity rises, evolves, and, if not adequately sustained, may fall.